SSL (otherwise known as TLS, SSL’s successor) plays a very important part on the internet. It can be used to protect sensitive information such as account credentials when logging in to your webmail, or credit card details when you’re shopping online.
SSL/TLS is also used in sending emails between mail servers (and email clients talking to mail servers to pick up or send mail), chat servers, and many other applications that communicate with each other across public networks.
Google recently announced that they’re intending to increasing the Google search ranking of wholly TLS protected web sites after Google switched all of their services to use TLS by default.
What this means is that it’ll help to encourage an internet in which every web site is secured by TLS. Every letter, number or symbol you type will be encrypted between your web browser and the server regardless of whatever that information may be – not just credit card or account logins.
It’ll make things very much harder for man-in-the-middle attacks and other snooping methods which have been exposed during the Edward Snowden revelations.
I’ve decided to enable SSL for all pages and posts on this blog even though you’re only reading these posts. If you do comment, the connection to Disqus is already encrypted. If you search internally, that’ll be encrypted between your web browser and my web server.
SSL certificates are ridiculously cheap if you know where to look. I use Namecheap, and have bought single site (well, bare domain and www subdomain) SSL certificates for $9.99 per year or less. They’re not too difficult to install either (with cPanel/WHM it’s very easy – non-control panel software is a little more fiddly).
Stay safe everyone!
